Could definitely chuck Global Pandemic on the list too.
If you’re American you’d probably also include the war(s) in the Middle East, nationwide racial justice protests, multiple impeachments, the arrest & indictment of a former president, the failed coup on Jan 6th, and a lot more.
I grew up in a rural shit hole where we got 50 kbps. In 2010. That’s K like “kill myself” not M as in “Moneybags”. Have you ever downloaded 4 gigabyte video games at 50 kbps so you can play with your friends? These are real problems.
On average, whether over a large enough population or a long enough time, people are living better and better.
Literacy rates are improving and information is becoming easier to access.
Medicine is always innovating. Medical care is becoming more and more available. Many deadly diseases are either wiped out or easily treatable.
For much (most?) of the world, nutritious food, clean water, and sanitation is available (if not always affordable).
Sure, some where in the world there is natural disaster, but we are constantly getting better at predicting them and buildings are being built to better handle them. There is still violence and unjust governments, but both are trending down.
That is not to say that we cannot do much much better nor that there are not easy things that we could do to improve. It is likely that your current situation has gotten worse in some way or another. But we are averaging ten steps forward for every step back (no matter how big and unnecessary that step back is).
Take China for example. A middle class person in China today lives like an upper class person compared to the 1700s. A poor person on average anywhere is doing way better than ever before…
Yes spending most of the day in a factory or a mine and rarely seeing sunlight is definitively like living as a blacksmith 300 years ago (I said blacksmith because it’s under upper class and I assume by middle class you mean office worker not middle income)
Being a farmer is much easier as well now because machines make the work 100x easier and you only have to do 1000x the amount.
Africa has certainly never had stability and the Inca/Mayans/Aztecs certainly had it worse than the rural folk of Central and South America
Remember all those old paintings of kids going through garbage to find things to sell? That’s certainly not a modern phenomenon
What about the people in winter climates that for a large portion couldn’t work in the winter? Yes they still did stuff but it wasn’t 40 hour weeks
I don’t think I get your argument. Poor countries are much more prone to war, unrest, famines and all sorts of things contrary to “comfort and stability”.
I love how the teenagers here think that right wing ideology is the cause of the world’s problems, even though the left has been in power for like decades, literally in Europe and in the US conservatives are shifting with the overton window and becoming more to the left.
Keep voting left, and then when your countries fall, I’ll be laughing.
Suffer more, and feed my joy. You deserve every bit of it. You voted for it. You want it, and I love watching it.
The fact that you don’t realize that is evidence of how delusional you are. What country would you like? Let’s pick Germany, the strongest country in Europe economically.
The only right-wing party there and the one that’s vocal is the AfD. It took the price of electricity doubling and the AfD is at 20%, and the current government is launching all kinds of efforts trying to delegitimize them. And I don’t believe that 20% means anything. It’s just the usual cucks trying to “make a point”.
The government in Germany has been CDU forever and now SPD. Both parties are extreme left in everything. CDU is only conservative by name. Every single policy they followed is left wing, including socialism, open borders, trans nonsense, carbon nonsense, etc.
Now explain to me exactly when in Germany was the politics primarily right wing in the last 20 years.
You guys are pathetic! You’re so delusional it feels good to see you suffer. I mean… you wouldn’t even acknowledge that the mainstream has been leftist for decades? Amazing!
Keep voting left. Maybe the collapse will teach you a lesson or two.
Yes, CDU and SPD pushing big government, carbon taxes, fossil fuels nonsense, gender pronouns, higher taxes… yeah, that’s all right-wing in the heart. Go fuck yourself. I don’t want to talk to you. Keep voting for them and call them right-wing all you want. The collapse will teach you and make me laugh.
The conservatives where I live absolutely hate gay and trans people. I see it almost daily. Until conservatives can get their head on straight over basic things like this, they are fighting an uphill battle to get me to take them seriously about anything else.
90s kids are too young to have genuinely been affected by most of this. They’re mostly now in their mid 20s and have been in the workforce for less than a decade.
I think 70s and 80s kids saw a lot worse because the recessions actually affected their working lives.
As a 74, the recession in the early 90s was crushing as I entered the workforce. The Y2K Dotcom crash in 2000 ended my career in my mid 20s. The subprime meltdown hit me in my prime working years (34).
I’m born 94. I remember mowing lawns of the neighborhood and selling all of my pokemon cards in 2006 because my parents explain to me we were struggling. They didn’t ask me to do it. I did it on my own. Because I wanted to help.
I didn’t need to be and adult to experience an economic crisis. And it didn’t exactly stop in 2007 either now did it?
I remember 2001 as well. It was a very big deal.
Y2k was nothing. Or so I was told when I asked what the fuzz is about. Since some people acted like the Mayan calendar was coming to an end.
So I don’t see why you feel like you need to gatekeep who did and didn’t “genuinly” experience certain events. Those who knows, knows. Isn’t that enough?
You say they are different. That’s true. But that doesn’t make it any less genuine or felt.
I may have been 12 when the economy turned sour in 2006. But so what? I can Guarantee you, I felt that just as much as anyone else.
Good for you that you were insulated from protests and strikes. I cant say I was insulated from an economy that collapsed. I didn’t lose a job. Because I didn’t have one. But that doesn’t really seem to matter at all when I was affected by it just like everyone else.
I didn’t lose a job. But I had to eat oatmeal 3 times a day. I chose to sell my stuff and do extra work to provide some extra money to my household. Because times were rough. So tell me again how me being a kid matters?
Are you really arguing that having no actual responsibilities is the same as having the weight of a collapsing world on your shoulders? Having been a kid, then a teenager, and now an adult, I can’t even comprehend how someone can seriously make this argument.
I’ve read that it turned out to be a nothing burger primarily because there was a concerted effort to address the problem. That said, yeah, nothing melted down so functionally there was no issue.
Yeah, there was a ton of awareness leading up and code was brought up to spec. I’m not saying nothing was done and we skirted through. Luckily there were only a couple of blips that didn’t really wreck anything
Ukrainian 90s babies living through the collapse of the USSR, decade of banditry and poverty, 2 revolutions, a plague, and the largest war since WW2 before they hit 30:
Born in '83, I don’t remember anyone bothering with it too much. It was all over the news and such, sure, but I don’t recall anyone I knew caring about it all that much; both adults and children.
I’m 40 now and living through all this crap has definitely taken a toll. I didn’t get into a house until last year, so I missed the cheap housing, and I’ve been significantly affected by most of this. I still live paycheque to paycheque, and I have no significant savings or retirement money put away.
I have had a pretty strange experience in life though, even compared to my peers. I dropped out of HS, then after about 5 years got my highschool equivalency, went to college, did two different two year programs in about 5 years (there’s a story there too, it should have been 3-3.5 years, ended up closer to 5), got into some disappointing jobs, unemployed for a while a couple of times for nontrivial amounts of time each time… it’s been a ride. I’m fairly stable now, though my financial situation is fairly fragile. With the new recession/inflation, it’s causing some stress and worry.
I was born in 94 and I remember 9/11. I remember the turn of the millennium cause I remember finding it hard to write 2000 instead of 199X in my school book, but I don’t think I was aware of Y2K
Don’t forget you have Y2K38 coming up. Whereas Y2K was all about mainframes and old databases, Y2K38 will be older embedded equipment. Less impact if it goes bad, but there’s no way to predict everything it’ll affect.
Mainframes and old databases? It was 98/99 not 88/89. I spent all my time updating Netscape navigator, Windows and Java in my IT job for a fortune 500. I’m sure someone was still running crazy old stuff, someone always is, but it was solidly the age of the internet by then. I had a cable modem by that time.
With regards to old databases, they were used by tons of small businesses and industrial users. If a flour mill had a system written to track bulk shipments in 1992, you can bet it would still be in use in 2000. Fortune 500 companies run mostly off the shelf software and keep it up to date, but the SCADA system that runs a factory is a different story.
As far as mainframes go, the financial and manufacturing industries still use them. Quite a bit of the infrastructure we rely on even today is written in COBOL. It’s easy to miss because the mainframe community is almost completely separate from the rest of the IT world, but it’s there and even with IBM’s push to get everyone on Java it won’t be going away any time soon.